Enclaves, Exclaves and the World's Weirdest Borders

A few of the world's borders look like the work of an irritated cartographer. There are towns where the international line runs through the middle of a kitchen, countries entirely contained inside other countries, and — until 2015 — a piece of land that was India inside Bangladesh inside India inside Bangladesh. Here is a guided tour of the strangest political borders on Earth.

Enclave vs exclave: the same place, two perspectives

An enclave is a piece of territory completely surrounded by another country's territory, viewed from the surrounding country's perspective. An exclave is the same piece of territory viewed from the perspective of the country that owns it — its own land, but separated from the main body. Most strange-border places are both at once: Kaliningrad is a Russian exclave (Russia owns it but it's separated from Russia proper) and a non-EU enclave inside the EU (the EU surrounds it).

One more definition that comes up: a pene-exclave is a region you can't reach from the rest of your country without crossing another country, even though you technically could swim across a body of water. Alaska is a pene-exclave of the USA — you can drive there only via Canada — but it's not strictly speaking an exclave because it has its own ocean coastline.

The three sovereign-country enclaves

Three full UN-member countries are completely surrounded by a single neighbour:

• Vatican City — surrounded by Italy. Population ~800. Area 0.44 km². The smallest sovereign country on Earth.
• San Marino — surrounded by Italy. Population ~33,000. Claims to be the world's oldest surviving republic, founded 301 CE.
• Lesotho — surrounded by South Africa. Population ~2.3 million. The only African country that is an enclave of a single neighbour.

Vatican City and San Marino are both inside Italy and both have peculiar histories with it: Vatican City was carved out by the Lateran Treaty of 1929; San Marino has held its independence almost continuously since the 4th century by being too remote, too small, and too neutral to bother conquering. Lesotho is a different story — it was a British protectorate from 1869 specifically to prevent it from being absorbed into the surrounding Boer territories that later formed South Africa.

Famous exclaves

Kaliningrad — Russia's western outpost

An exclave of Russia on the Baltic Sea, separated from the rest of Russia by Lithuania and Belarus. Until 1945 it was part of East Prussia and called Königsberg, the home town of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. After the Soviet Union annexed it at the end of World War II, the German population was expelled, the city was rebuilt and renamed for Soviet politician Mikhail Kalinin, and it became the westernmost point of the USSR. Today the city sits surrounded by EU and NATO member states — Poland to the south, Lithuania to the north and east — making it one of the most geopolitically tense exclaves on Earth.

Nakhchivan — Azerbaijan, separated by Armenia

An autonomous republic of Azerbaijan completely separated from the rest of the country by Armenia. To travel between Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan by land you must cross either Armenia, Iran, or Georgia + Turkey. The exclave has roughly 460,000 residents and shares a 9 km border with Turkey, which is its only direct connection to a friendly state.

Cabinda — Angola's oil-rich exclave

An Angolan province separated from the rest of Angola by a strip of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Cabinda is small but valuable — it produces most of Angola's offshore oil. The exclave's awkward shape is a colonial relic from when Portugal and Belgium drew their respective lines through Africa without consulting each other.

Ceuta and Melilla — Spain in Africa

Two Spanish autonomous cities on the north coast of Morocco, the only EU territory on the African continent. Spain has held both since the 15th–16th centuries, predating Morocco's independence, and both are surrounded by Moroccan land but border the Mediterranean. Morocco still claims both.

Gibraltar — a British exclave on the Spanish mainland

A 6.7 km² British Overseas Territory at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula. It's not technically a country but is a self-governing British territory whose only land border is with Spain. Spain has claimed the territory since the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 ceded it to Britain; the population has voted overwhelmingly to remain British in two referendums.

The genuinely weird ones

Baarle — the chess-board town

Baarle is a single town divided between Belgium (Baarle-Hertog) and the Netherlands (Baarle-Nassau), with the international border weaving between — and sometimes through — individual buildings. There are 22 Belgian enclaves inside the Dutch town, and 8 Dutch counter-enclaves inside the Belgian enclaves. The arrangement dates to medieval feudal land sales between the Lords of Breda (Dutch) and the Dukes of Brabant (later Belgian) that were never tidied up. Today, residents pay taxes based on which country their front door is in. Where the border splits a house, the rule is that the front door determines nationality, so some homeowners have moved their front doors to a different wall to switch tax regimes.

Llívia — Spain inside France

Llívia is a Spanish town in the Pyrenees, separated from the rest of Spain by 1.6 km of French territory. It became an exclave in 1659 when the Treaty of the Pyrenees gave 33 nearby villages to France but left Llívia (which had town status, not village) as Spanish. The border has held ever since. The two countries built a "neutral road" through France connecting Llívia to Spain in 2007.

Point Roberts — a chunk of the USA you can only reach via Canada

Point Roberts is a US peninsula that hangs south of the 49th parallel — the US-Canada border — but is connected to the US mainland only via 25 km of Canadian highway. About 1,300 Americans live there. To go to school, get groceries, or work in the rest of the United States, residents drive into Canada, cross another international border, and then drive back into Washington state.

Dahala Khagrabari — the third-order enclave that took 70 years to fix

Until 2015, India and Bangladesh shared the world's only third-order enclave: a tiny piece of India (about 7,000 m²) inside a piece of Bangladesh inside a piece of India inside Bangladesh. It was called Dahala Khagrabari and was part of a tangle of 162 enclaves left over from the 1947 Partition. The whole arrangement was finally resolved by a land-swap treaty in 2015 — over 50,000 stateless residents had spent their lives unable to legally cross to schools or hospitals in the surrounding country.

Other single-case oddities

• Büsingen am Hochrhein — a German village completely surrounded by Switzerland, geographically Swiss but politically German.
• Campione d'Italia — an Italian municipality completely surrounded by Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Lugano.
• The Kentucky Bend — a piece of Kentucky almost entirely surrounded by Missouri and Tennessee, accessible only via a road that crosses through Tennessee. (Not international, but unusual.)
• Northwest Angle — a piece of Minnesota that hangs north of the 49th parallel into Canadian waters; only reachable by road via Canada.
• Madha and Nahwa — Oman has an enclave (Madha) inside the UAE; that enclave contains a UAE counter-enclave (Nahwa). One of the few remaining second-order enclaves on Earth.

Why these borders exist

Strange borders almost always come from one of three sources. Feudal land sales — Baarle, Llívia, Büsingen — created tangled enclaves before modern borders existed, and nobody ever rationalised them. Colonial-era treaties — Cabinda, Ceuta and Melilla, the India–Bangladesh enclaves — left lines that didn't match any natural geography because the people drawing them didn't care or didn't know. Post-war settlements — Kaliningrad, Nakhchivan, Northern Cyprus — created exclaves through forced territorial transfer that left some pieces stranded.

Most of the time, these arrangements are tolerated because the cost of fixing them is higher than the cost of living with them. The 2015 India-Bangladesh swap is the most recent significant border tidy-up; before that, you have to go back to the late 19th century to find another one of comparable scale.